Ballad of a Thin Man

"...something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?"

A song, a goofy, mock-dramatic ballad, from Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisted, 1965. Allegedly, "Mr. Jones", the target of Zimmy's venom, was a reporter from Time Magazine, who, in his quest to get an interview, was given a hard time (You try so hard but you just don't understand) by Dylan; this may be the person featured in D.A. Pennebaker's Eat the Document proto-rockumentary. The reporter would, in later years, wear it proudly - "I'm Mr. Jones!"

Yeah, there were a lot of Mister Joneses at that time. There obviously must have been a tremendous amount of them for me to write that particular song. It wasn't just one person. It was like, "Oh, man, here's the thousandth
Mister Jones."

-- Dylan, interviewed by Bill Flanagan in 1985, for Written in My Soul.